Barry Le Va

Barry Le Va’s groundbreaking early works were important examples of an artistic approach that emerged in the mid-1960s, when artists began placing emphasis on the processes and ideas of their art making rather than on finished objects. His Continuous and Related Activities; Discontinued by the Act of Dropping is a sculptural work, yet because it is contingent on the instructions and actions by which it is created, it challenges the very notion of what a sculpture is. The work consists of two hundred yards of maroon felt that the artist disperses in an almost performative fashion; working around a single large bolt of felt placed on the floor, Le Va tosses, folds, and positions variously sized pieces of felt to create a scattered but thoughtfully composed array across the gallery space. Four sheets of glass—each thirty-six inches square and a quarter-inch thick—are then held, one at a time, above the bolt at the center and dropped. The artist allows the shattered glass to remain wherever it falls. Le Va often created detailed, score-like drawings as starting points for such actions. For other of his “distribution” pieces from this era, the artist employed a range of materials including powdered cement, chalk, sand, ball bearings, and wood. In each instance, the viewer is confronted by an installation that exists as a kind of chance effect of the artist’s deliberate actions, the aftermath of the activity. As Le Va explained about his work from this period, “I became intrigued by the idea of visual clues, the way Sherlock Holmes managed to reconstruct a plot from obscure visual evidence. What I’m trying to do now is set up situations in which audiences have to use their minds to piece elements back together.”